right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and
seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man
would give something to have been born in such places. What
a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where
the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how
many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my
contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its
recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now
almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions,
seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to
take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!
How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by
the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never
catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!

"Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like
structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it
almost everywhere vanished?

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error